EXCLUSIVE: High Beams ‘Red Wine’ video premiere

The Spinoff presents the video premiere of High Beams’ (IllBaz, Melodownz and Raiza Biza) ‘Red Wine’ video, the New Zealand Goodfellas (or, Goodfullas)

IllBaz (Baz Raghib) says:

Off the back of the ‘Live Stream’ video which we released to set the tone for the record, we wanted to do things a little differently with ‘Red Wine’. As we’ve explained about the project, it has deep, serious topics it touches on but it also has moments that are not so serious and just a bit of fun. That really describes us as people, we care about some serious issues but we’re human as well, we have our days where we like to enjoy ourselves and the people around us. I think ‘Red Wine’ emphasises that notion.

We went full Martin Scorsese with the concept, we chose our favourite scenes from movies and pretty much just did it better – by better I mean an honest attempt at not completely failing. I sum up this ‘Red Wine’ video as the New Zealand Goodfellas – Goodfullas if you will.

In terms of the filming process, we worked with our go-to-director Connor Pritchard, whose past work includes our ‘Live Stream’ video. The beauty of working with Connor is that he’ll take your initial skeleton of an idea and turn it into a complete vision. We wanted to the play with the main concepts of the song, enjoying some red wine and watching an array of movies which essentially led to the main idea of the video, us acting out a compilation of our favourite movies, including my personal favourite, the classic Joe Pesci “funny how?” scene from Goodfellas. It’s a cult classic and with the opportunity to bring that to life with our own New Zealand style had me rehearsing lines more than my DJ sets.

We also took inspiration from Saving Private Ryan but instead of the invasion of Normandy beaches, it was the invasion of the Unitec fields. The last movie scene is one I don’t think I need to explain more than “HERE’S JOHNNY!”

HighBeams TourThursday 2 August – Queenstown, World BarFriday 3 August – Wellington, MeowSaturday 4 August – Auckland – Anthology Lounge
Tickets on sale now at Under the Radar

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